KW
X (Twitter) ↗

Kain Warwick

Things Kain Says on Podcasts

Founder of Synthetix and Infinex, two projects in decentralized finance. Hosts Uneasy Money, the weekly segment of Laura Shin's Unchained feed, alongside Taylor Monahan and Austin Griffith, covering hacks, wallet security, AI, stablecoin regulation and DeFi governance.

“If Binance were to turn up today and say, 'Hey, guys, you can only take out a billion dollars a day for the next 90 days,' it would be over. You can't say that, because the adversarial nature of crypto is people go, 'Oh, you only have a billion dollars,' and everyone would freak out and start nuking everything.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained “Banks are not prepared for this. The thing that banks have relied on for like 100 years is the slowness of them.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained “There's actually a much more elegant solution that the clanker found in like seven seconds. You spent your whole life doing this, and then the clanker is just so much smarter than you. And literally, it was like, why don't you just use the token authority to create an approval to transfer the tokens?” — Kain Warwick, Unchained “There's no such thing as a price of an asset. It's a construct. People go, 'Oh, what's the price of Bitcoin?' Depends on how much you have. Depends on how motivated you are. The price of Bitcoin during a hack is not the same as the price of Bitcoin not during a hack, because you have a motivated seller that is willing to sell.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

Where to Find Them

Kain Warwick hosts Unchained .

Recently: “Uneasy Money: What the $6B Binance Hack Revealed About Who Can Freeze Stolen Funds” on Unchained (November 2026); “Uneasy Money: Why Anthropic's IPO Governance Has Crypto Veterans Worried” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: Is the Internet Breaking Because Bots Never Get Lazy?” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: Why Ledger's Supply Chain Became a Nearly $100M Target” on Unchained (October 2026); “How OpenAI's Math Dump Has Crypto Rethinking Its Cryptography: Uneasy Money” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: The $388M Bitget Hack Started With a Security Vendor” on Unchained (October 2026).

What They Said

“If Binance were to turn up today and say, 'Hey, guys, you can only take out a billion dollars a day for the next 90 days,' it would be over. You can't say that, because the adversarial nature of crypto is people go, 'Oh, you only have a billion dollars,' and everyone would freak out and start nuking everything.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

The guests were debating whether withdrawal or borrowing limits could have contained the losses from the Binance hack. Kain Warwick explains why an exchange can't throttle withdrawals without triggering a bank run.

Unchained · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 22:56 into the episode
Kain Warwick

…grinds to a halt and everyone's like waiting because North Korea's dumped a billion dollars in. And so now no one can borrow for the next month because the ratchet is sitting there. Like these are all non-trivial things to solve, right? Like clearly you guys are trying to balance this. Well, yeah,

Adam Sadowski

…how much usability and immediate access to capital do we want to allow versus how much security and sort of decentralized kind of using NPC, you know, multiple signatures across multiple parties distributed. So how difficult we want to make it to access those funds and use, put their money to use.

Kain Warwick

You know, it's interesting, right? Because someone I know in one of the groups I'm in was like, do we remember the Bimex days of like the daily withdrawal window? And everyone was like, holy shit. No, we actually didn't all remember that. You were the only one. And it's kind of, you know, it's kind of funny, right? Because there is this like bank run risk that every exchange needs to balance. If you say, you know, if Binance were to turn up today and say, all right, hey, guys, you can only take out a billion dollars a day for the next 90 days, it would be over. Like, you can't say that because immediately. The adversarial nature of crypto is people go, oh, you only have a billion dollars, and you're like scrounging through, you know, uh, CZ's couch cushions to find the next billion for tomorrow to let us out. And everyone would freak out and start nuking everything, and the world would explode, right? Um, and so you can't just be like, You can't have your money, you need to like, and you definitely can't change the rules, but at the same time, you've got to have this balance of like, should we…

Taylor Monahan

yeah yeah so this this

Adam Sadowski

actually um reminds me of another point that i wanted to make about the the incident and the response on aave so when we uh convened at the war room and made the decision to freeze the markets i also wanted to talk a little bit about uh what freezing means because going off of what you you're…

Kain Warwick

got yeah cool okay um all right let's go to ads we'll come back and we'll we'll talk some more about this because this is definitely the biggest thing to talk about the choice yeah yeah all right uh we'll be back in a minute

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Banks are not prepared for this. The thing that banks have relied on for like 100 years is the slowness of them.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

The guests were discussing a reported hack of a large French bank whose stolen funds were quickly converted into crypto. Kain Warwick argues banks aren't set up for fast, crypto-linked theft.

Unchained · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 1:08:06 into the episode
Taylor Monahan

right. All we know is that it's definitely not Lazarus. So not only did this bank get hacked, but they got hacked by not the best hackers in the world.

Adam Sadowski

I mean, dude, they're banks,

Kain Warwick

man. Like, they're banks. Like, these guys, like, see, as funny as CZ pretending like he'd never heard of banks was like, banks are not prepared for this shit. Like, he's right. Like, I should say, banks are not fucking prepared for this shit. Like, you know, the thing that banks have relied on for whatever, like 100 years, right? Is like the slowness of them. But

Taylor Monahan

even the banks aren't slow anymore. Like, there's, it's not just like no, no, no. They're faster now.

Kain Warwick

They're faster. And they're like, crypto is much more connected to TradFi. There's many more egress vectors for money. It's not like you just call up your friend at the other French bank in fucking, you know, Marseille. We're not,

Taylor Monahan

we're not like, hey, bro, sorry.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“There's actually a much more elegant solution that the clanker found in like seven seconds. You spent your whole life doing this, and then the clanker is just so much smarter than you. And literally, it was like, why don't you just use the token authority to create an approval to transfer the tokens?” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

Kain Warwick recounts how Synthetix had long believed it couldn't recover tokens stolen in the Binance hack without rewriting token state. 'Clanker' is his word for an AI model, which spotted a much simpler route.

Unchained · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 31:16 into the episode
Kain Warwick

It's not baked into the

Adam Sadowski

…now for it's really the first time this has been possible to have like a neutral infrastructure that has proven high integrity where developers, risk managers, protocol teams can implement their own custom logic into these off-chain systems that integrate with the on-chain component of the system.

Kain Warwick

All right. Let's let's go through a couple more of the incidents here. So one involved synthetics. So I can. I can speak to that directly. So, so we got up, and I think like 20, maybe 20 million or 25 million or something like that. Uh, SNX, it's like solidly like 10-15% of the total supply of SNXs on Binance, right? So, anything happens to Binance, I'm like, definitely that's waking me up, right? So, um, so it was my morning, and I was like, okay, let's figure out what's going on here. Um, you know, we identified the wallet, uh, I think it was about 9 million SNX had been stolen. Um, but because synthetics has historically said, eh, there's nothing we can do, um, they didn't bother to do anything with it, they just let it sit there. They're probably like, yeah, we got years before these guys figured their shit out, right? Um, but unfortunately, it was it was not to be um, because we were like, All right, hang on a second, this is clearly North Korea, the biggest hack in history. Like, we cannot sit here and do nothing. Like, let's go back to first principles and ask the question…

Taylor Monahan

Oh. And I was like,

Kain Warwick

no, no, no, we can't do that. Literally, like, this is in the office. People were talking. And I was like, no, no, no, that wouldn't work. We can't do it because it wouldn't work. And one of the guys is like, Opus is pretty convinced that it would work. And I was like, fuck that guy. He doesn't…

Taylor Monahan

Oh, we can just create a new approval. Yeah. It just created a

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“There's no such thing as a price of an asset. It's a construct. People go, 'Oh, what's the price of Bitcoin?' Depends on how much you have. Depends on how motivated you are. The price of Bitcoin during a hack is not the same as the price of Bitcoin not during a hack, because you have a motivated seller that is willing to sell.” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

Another guest had just said price feeds are presented as the 'true' price of an asset. Kain Warwick, who has built oracles, argues the idea of a single price was never accurate, in a discussion of the Binance hack.

Unchained · 2026-11-05 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 28:30 into the episode
Kain Warwick

Yeah.

Adam Sadowski

…because we have access to exchange data from multiple exchanges. We can do an aggregation method and it's pretty straightforward. But we're starting to see with more sophisticated or more novel kind of collateral types that are coming on chain now that this assumption is starting to change. It's

Kain Warwick

always been wrong, man. Like it's always been wrong. There's no such thing as a price of an asset. That's like it's a construct that like people don't they like, oh, what's the price of Bitcoin, right? Depends on how much you have. Depends on how much you have. Depends on how motivated you are, right? The price of Bitcoin during a hack is not the same as the price of Bitcoin not during a hack, right? Because you have a motivated seller that is willing to sell and therefore, you know, just saying like, oh, yeah, it's mid-market on Binance or whatever, right? Like what happens if Binance is having a bad day? So I think it's never, it's unfortunately never been that simple. Anyone who's built an Oracle know, you know, you go down a rabbit hole really quickly. You're like, oh, you just like point at that price. CoinGecko, those guys are pretty accurate. And it's like, no, no, well, hang on a second. Like, what's the latency on CoinGecko? Oh, it's 15 minutes. Okay. Well, so it's the price 15 minutes ago. But like it's it's unending, as I as I know you know, right? But like it's not a trivial thing to know about the…

Adam Sadowski

And with uh and I'm starting to get towards uh the novel asset class that's that's becoming popular lately. So tokenized stocks are the latest craze. Yeah. And they've been coming to Aave. So we we have a tokenized stock instance on base chain that just deployed two months ago. And this asset class…

Kain Warwick

when we first launched WTI, right? Like this is hilarious, right? So like Chainlink and Synthetix, when we were first launching our crude oil prices, right? You got Brandon W. I kind of

Adam Sadowski

remember that actually. Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Crypto & Web3